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Thoreau was an ardent lover of all things “natural”; contrary to caricatures of him, he was not so enamored with nature that he only saw its “positive” aspects. In fact, he came to understand quite well how diverse and complex the natural world is. It is accurate to say that he saw the beauty of nature and its life-giving potential, and this led him to reimagine who the human being is. In his essay “Walking” (1862), Thoreau addresses his desire for being more connected with the natural world: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society” (Excursions 185). Instead of ignoring the natural world, Thoreau wants to honor its importance, but he makes it clear that it is through nature and in nature that humanity is more than it is in civil society. In other words, society constructs a reductive image of humans as outside of nature and separate from it, but this is a dehumanizing process, as being fully human is realizing how we are part of the natural environment everywhere surrounding, embracing, penetrating, and integrating us.

This does not mean, however, that the natural world takes notice of humanity. Thoreau knew that the natural world provides humans with needed materials to survive, but just as much as it helps us to survive, it also can be violent and indifferent to humanity’s welfare. In Cape Cod (1865), Thoreau describes the tendency nature has of “wasting no thought on man.”

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world . . . The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar . . . . It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,—a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature,—inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. (147)

The ocean can be beautiful, but here Thoreau describes the very inhumane sincerity that gives the ocean its character. As much as the water supports a lively world below its surface, it harbors within it dead, decaying bodies that find little rest among the nonstop agitations and undulations of the waves.

While the popular perception of Thoreau can focus on his desire to preserve nature, its beauty, and its inspiring qualities, Thoreau does not ignore the potential danger that constitutes a great portion of nature. The ocean could carry commerce and people from continent to continent, but it could also toss boats around, sink them, and drown their passengers. Thoreau, therefore, was not blind to the immense power and dangers of nature, and he knew well the fear this could generate.

Based on his travels to Maine, Thoreau’s The Maine Woods (1864) provides startling accounts of the natural world and its relation with humans. One of the best-known passages concerns Thoreau’s ascent and descent of Mt. Ktaadn, which stands 5,269 feet high and is located almost in the center of Maine. Thoreau was not ready for the feeling of dislocation he would be subjected to as he crossed a rugged, lightning-charred portion of the mountain; being outside of commonly-encountered surroundings and traversing the harsh portion of Ktaadn, Thoreau explains,

Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over Burnt Lands, burnt by lightning . . . It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful . . . I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me. Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? (69-71)

Here Thoreau becomes dispossessed of the familiarity he has felt in nature; the starkness of the landscape and the raw materiality of the mountain thrust his own materiality into question, which generates a desire for material contact. He moves from the land that is inhuman to his need for contact; he has encountered a part of nature that does not make him feel at home, but has reduced him to feeling less than himself, or other than himself. His materiality has become fleetingly insignificant in the face of the extremeness of the mountain’s overwhelming, non-comforting charred rockiness.

Nature is complex and without a consistent fond engagement with human life. At moments, it can be home and friend, a place for journeys and discoveries; at other times, it can be a threat to life, a brutal reminder of humanity’s dependence and finitude. To appreciate Thoreau’s outlook on the natural world, then, readers need to be aware of these disparate qualities of the natural world.

Despite this ambiguity concerning the character of the natural world, Thoreau’s writings continuously return to water for context and as a metaphor structuring his ontological outlook. From his earliest journal entries to his last years of journaling, the focus on water is prevalent. This emphasis is most evident in the final years of his life when he logged detailed data in his journals concerning the variations of water levels of the Concord River throughout the seasons. Similarly, the two books published during his life, A Week and Walden, are based on the importance of a source of water for the setting; in A Week, the setting is the Concord and Merrimack rivers, and in Walden, it is Walden Pond. In his two posthumously published books, The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, Thoreau is dependent on water, as it is inseparable from the overall progression of his writings; in The Maine Woods, for example, Thoreau travels by water from the Penobscot River and Chamberlain Lake to Moosehead Lake, and Cape Cod remains largely focused on the Atlantic Ocean and its impact on Cape Cod and its inhabitants.

Sherman Paul makes this clear in his book on Thoreau; he addresses the deep spiritual and ontological significance of water for Thoreau.

[There was] something irresistible in water for Thoreau, that something so spiritually akin to him that he felt himself called to it ‘by a natural impulse’ . . . the constant lure was the quest for a reality that had been encrusted by time and landed conventions, a reality to be regained by experience outside of time—that is, by immersion in its flux . . . The river had become the way of communion with the eternal. (199)

Thoreau makes water’s significance quite clear at the beginning of A Week when he focuses on rivers as highways and their constant ability to lure people into the deep recesses of uncharted territories: “Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers of their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. They are the natural highways of all nations . . .” (12). Human life and water are inseparable; water sustains life, travel, and the imagination.

Thoreau uses water for more than his settings, however, as he constructs his ontology on the flowing nature of water and the belief that change is a constant part of existence. Thoreau is comfortable with how all aspects of the world are changing; he made this discovery toward the end of his boating voyage with his brother, as he describes the flowing nature of all existence:

. . . all things seemed with us to flow; the shore itself, and the distant cliffs, were dissolved by the undiluted air. The hardest material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the long run it does. Trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the surface. And in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current of the hour. (A Week 244)

Instead of allowing readers to think that returning to land would be the halting point for encountering flows, Thoreau honors the changes going on below our feet and all around us. Instead of stability, there is flux everywhere, and this challenges our desires for permanence.

In a more famous passage from Walden, Thoreau brings the Earth’s alterations into the foreground.

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale . . . When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before . . . . I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artists who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work . . . I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe . . . . What is man but a mass of thawing clay? . . . . Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature . . . It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth babe fingers on every side. (304-08)

This thawing, which is taking place around the railroad tracks, is a small portion of what is occurring on a larger scale. The flow of the sand and clay reminds Thoreau of the flowing taking place within the human body, and it convinces him that Earth is still in a process of changing and maturing. This is Thoreau’s “ontology of flows,” or his belief that the nature of being is in a constant state of perpetual flux. It is philosophically incorrect to emphasize permanence or stagnation over change.

This view of the natural world has serious implications for Thoreau’s outlook on life and interactions with others. Societal structures like to keep things orderly, and societies like to categorize aspects of the world and rank them according to which aspects are extremely valuable compared to those things that are insignificant. This is what Thoreau identifies as the “civilizing processes” in American society. He links this with domestication, taming, and scripted hospitality. These attempts to constrain people oppose the natural flows constituting all existence, so Thoreau pursues a process of “becoming feral.” He wants to become uncivilized, untamed, or wild.

He needs the natural world and its wildness to keep him healthy, and Thoreau is often quite condemnatory concerning the effects society has on humans, which is present as early as his “Natural History of Massachusetts” (1842):

In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. There is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures . . . The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. (Excursions 5)

Despite the potential dangers found in the natural world, there is a rejuvenating element that restores the person to health and maintains a more agreeable perspective on life. To be trapped indoors and in the grips of customs and habits is anathema to Thoreau; he sought the healthy, resilient fluctuations of the natural world until he was bedridden in the last days of his life because of tuberculosis. The wildness of creation always called to him.