Book Review: They took to the woods — for a while

Once my mother resigned herself to a lifetime on the hill where my father grew up, she embarked on a course of reading about her new surroundings. Many of the books I heard her mention to her friends tended to the fictional side, such as "The Pilgrim Soul," an imaginative account of pioneering in northern New Hampshire. Also on her list was Louise Dickinson Rich's account of woodland life in the upper reaches of Oxford County, "We Took to the Woods" (J. B. Lippincott, 1942), but it wasn't fiction. Rich described her real-life existence amid the vast paper-company wilderness east of Lake Umbagog.

Like Thoreau, she recounted where she lived and what she lived for, addressing economy early in her narrative, as Concord's quondam hermit did. She addressed all the details suggested by the titles of Thoreau's chapters. Her own chapter titles reflect questions posed by outsiders who can't fathom anyone willingly subjecting themselves to primitive accommodations, but they touch on the same topics of reading, solitude, visitors and wildlife. Where Thoreau had only one pond, Rich has several.