SEARCHING FOR REMNANTS OF THOREAU'S WALDEN POND.

Byline: Randy Lee Loftis Dallas Morning News

Henry David Thoreau walked through woods and found the world.

``In wildness is the preservation of the world,'' he wrote. ``Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. ... I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.''

Sunday morning, cool weather: Walden Pond reflects the colors of leaves. Four or five people fish from the shore, and one man from a small boat alone.

Others walk beside the water toward the little monument in the woods. It marks the place where, in 1845, Thoreau built his cabin.

One writes about Thoreau's Walden with some risk. No writer has matched the original description, and none should pretend to try.

Nature writer Tim Homan, editor of a collection of Thoreau excerpts, calls Thoreau's prose ``remarkable for its capacity and desire to chisel a concept to its crystal essence - brilliant, concise, eloquent.''

Homan credits Thoreau with creating the literary nature essay. A century before Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Thoreau expressed the human heart in wood and water.

``Where the most beautiful wild-flowers grow, there man's spirit is fed, and poets grow,'' Thoreau wrote.

Thoreau nurtured a passion for the wild age of Earth and gave it voice. He prodded his farmer-neighbors to leave their plows awhile and take to the woods while there were still woods.

America had no name for this pull of nature in 1845. No tour guide made a dollar off weekend walkers. Today, the masses who head for track and trail, or for jungle or mountain, obey the same call.

Now we organize and schedule our outdoor experiences and call them by an inelegant name: ``eco-tourism.''

Thoreau made a poor living off of nature. The market had not yet developed.

The woods and meadows of eastern Massachusetts were tame by his time. For two centuries the settlers and their descendants had worked to make New England look like old England: ordered, fenced, parklike.

Thoreau's desire to go back to a primitive past must have seemed insane to those who had prospered in comfortable towns and on well-mannered farms. He said that they were the crazy ones.

``What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods, their solitude and darkness?'' he wrote. ``What salvation is there for him?''

If Thoreau came back today, he would see a paved road bending over a hill above Walden Pond.

He would still find trees and the sky and the second, secret forest he perceived in the damp earth and leaves on the woodland floor.

He would find a small souvenir shop near his cabin site, selling his books and his likeness on T-shirts.

He would find a pay phone and a boathouse.

Thoreau would hear the Amtrak train rumble past and the jets throttling down for Boston.

He would find the idea of ``wilderness'' enshrined in federal law. The civil libertarian in him might scoff that officially sanctioned wilderness is no wilderness at all. But Thoreau lived in a nation that still counted the Midwest as a frontier. Plenty of real wilderness remained to be walked.

Thoreau also would find a musician, Don Henley, and his friends raising money to buy privately held land around Walden.

Others have argued the whethers and hows of the Walden Woods Project. Here, let it just be remarked that such an effort is remarkable.

Meanwhile, visitors still climb the low hill to the cabin site and carry out a tradition. They pick up a small stone out of the woods and place it in a pile as a rough memorial to Thoreau.