From Hardy Boys to Henry Thoreau

Screwing up Your Life is Always Better with Books

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A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. (Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)

In my sophomore or junior year of high school, I was reading a novel called Pony Girl, about an 11-year-old girl whose father’s new wife, a loud and garish woman with a big heart, convinces her husband to buy a neglected pony-ride concession at a small-town carnival. Together the family nurses the maltreated ponies, repairs the stables and fences, and helps revive the declining fair. I enjoyed the story and never forgot it, but it was below my reading level and also not exactly a “boys” book. Embarrassed by its cover, I turned the title inward when carrying the book through the school corridors (in the late seventies, school backpacks were not nearly as prevalent as they are now. Struggling to keep three or four textbooks plus several torn spiral notebooks aligned in the crook of one arm was a daily challenge.)

I was an indiscriminate reader; whatever fell into my hands was fair game. First, the books assigned by my English teacher as soon as they were handed out (Othello, A Separate Peace); then, whatever caught my eye on the school and public library shelves. I remember this one novel about a boy who turned into a dog, and another, a tragedy, about a group of teenagers involved in a terrible car crash. Only one boy survived because he had leaned down to pick up his classmate’s dropped purse at just the right moment and was cushioned by the backside of the front seat.

And of course, I continued to devour the Hardy Boys mysteries; I would buy them from Bradlees department store whenever I had a few dollars, reading them not in order but, rather, choosing them by the cover art, whichever looked the most exciting. Despite my haphazard acquisition technique, I kept them in chronological order on my bookshelf and would have liked to own the entire series, but never did. I’d amassed about a dozen or so before I moved on to other works.*

I read during class, keeping my book just under the edge of my desk and out of the teacher’s view, I read on the school bus, and I read during lunch. Considering my romantic ineptitude, I should have paid more attention to this one spirited girl who would sit across from me at lunch and try to gain my attention by closing my book as I read. I would listen to what she had to say with my hand between the book’s covers, index finger marking my spot. Eventually, she would return to her friends.

It’s a shame my reading wasn’t more well guided or informed by someone with a bit of literary knowledge, perhaps a caring teacher or librarian (I didn’t read Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird until well into my 20s). I’ve read of such scenarios, or seen them in movies: a young boy or girl, studious and shy, is discovered and nurtured, encouraged to go to college despite generational poverty or neglect, and ends up breaking the family mold, becoming a successful writer or artist. Or CEO. Or president.

Fantasy.

Here is the support and encouragement I received in regards to post-secondary education:

Guidance counselor: What do you like to do?

Me: I really like camping and the outdoors.

Guidance counselor: Have you heard of Paul Smith’s College? They have a great Forest Recreation Program. Why don’t you apply?

Me: Okay.

Thoreau was there for me through seven years of a bad first marriage, reminding me of my lost, or undiscovered self, though only during stolen moments because my wife was jealous of my reading. “It must be nice to have time to yourself,” she would snap whenever she caught me with a book. It’s true she was busy with the kids while I worked as a carpenter, out in the open air and sunshine every day. But—and I say this with humor, not acrimony—I would sum up that early relationship with these words of Thoreau: “It is as if, after the friendliest and most ennobling intercourse, your Friend should use you as a hammer, and drive a nail with your head...”

I lost many things in the divorce, including my marked-up copy of Walden. I wish I could turn its pages once again, to see which lines meant something to me in my 20s and 30s. Of course, my current volume is as marked up and highlighted, as bookmarked, underscored, and dog-eared as the original.

I did end up going to Paul Smith’s, the first in my family to attend college, but I dropped out in my second semester, homesick and confused about my career direction, and broke after paying my tuition with the money I’d saved working as a stock boy at Woolworth’s and as a gas attendant at my cousin’s service station. It would take several more tries and many years—well after my failed marriage—before I finally earned a bachelor’s degree in English, attending classes with students less than half my age. I took seminars in Whitman and Thoreau and interned as assistant editor on the “Concord Saunterer,” the scholarly journal of the Thoreau Society.

After graduating, and a brief attempt at teaching, I returned to my work as a carpenter—it paid the best and was still where my confidence lay—but a paperback or library book always awaited me on the passenger seat of my truck.

My reading is more deliberate now. Some contemporary favorites include Paul Auster, Ann Patchett, Russel Banks, Barbara Kingsolver, José Saramago, Louise Erdrich, Morrison, Steinbeck, Irving, Russo, Edwidge Danticat, Julian Barnes, Jesmyn Ward...

And still the occasional story that is “below” my grade level (but not the least embarrassing): Because of Winn Dixie was great, as was Pax. And I adore Holes by Louis Sachar!

Thanks for reading. :-)

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*The ghost-written Hardy Boys franchise continues to this day; there are now several hundred titles in a handful of different series. As of 1979 the “first series” comprised 59 titles, so those would likely have been the volumes from which I formed my collection.

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Works mentioned

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden

—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

DiCamillo, Kate. Because of Winn Dixie. Candlewick Press, 2000

Pennypacker, Sara. Pax. Harper Collins, 2016

Sachar, Louis. Holes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

Always a pleasure!

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. (Thoreau, Walden)