GOING FULL WALDEN
Alone in a Cabin in Nevada's High Desert

II.

When I wake, I gaze across ancestral Shoshone land to the jagged silhouette of Nine Mile Mountain, the only landmark for miles. In front of me sits a juniper tree, a lone anchor in a sea of sagebrush. I’m in the Great Basin, where the land stretches out and everything seems to slow. Barry Lopez once described this region as “one of the least eulogized of American landscapes.” There is less American myth here to get in the way of a direct experience of nature than in the country’s more iconic deserts.

The cabin is of modern design, with a double bed, a wood-burning stove, a shower, a kitchen, an emergency radio, and a verandah that runs around the building. There is a well-stocked library filled with books by American authors I had been promising myself to read one day: Emerson, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson.

Tucked among them was a well thumbed Signet Classics edition of Walden.

I’d avoided reading Walden as I’d assumed it was too fusty for my modern tastes. But here I was staying in an American cabin in the wilderness, refusing to read the book most responsible for putting that dream into the collective imagination.

With no phone signal, no Wi-Fi and nowhere to be, I finally opened the book. I expected the familiar caricature: a stern nineteenth-century preacher urging simplicity and self-denial.

Instead, I found something stranger and far more modern.

III.

On my first night I walk along the wide valley at the back of the cabin. Taking the advice of the writer Edward Abbey, I leave my head torch in my pocket and let my eyes adjust to the dimness.

At first it’s unnerving, I struggle to find my footing in between the tufts of sagebrush, but as I continue, my eyes adjust, the night flows and I am in a world of starlight.

Coyotes begin calling somewhere beyond the ridge. It's the first time I've heard their yowl outside of a TV Screen, and I feel a stab of unease.

Back at the cabin, I lock the door and listen to unseen animals moving about on the verandah. I hear the birds on the corrugated roof above me scuttling around while a storm rattles across the basin.

IV.

It’s August, and my days are governed by the sun.

The low cloud from last night’s storm is still hanging over the cabin. I wake before sunrise, with a line from Walden in my head:

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

Thoreau loved mornings, arguing that most people are effectively only ‘awake’ during the very first hour of the morning. After that, they moved through life half-awake, distracted by noise, gossip, ambition and endless busyness.

I’m not so sure though, I find myself walking, half asleep, through the pre-dawn feeling like an awkward trespasser, trying not to disturb the delicate patchwork of cacti, wildflowers, and animal burrows that quilt the desert floor.

When I return, a cottontail rabbit sits on the verandah as I eat my fry-up and drink my iced coffee in the morning. Maybe I just need to go back to bed for a few hours.

While I am hardly “living Spartan-like” the cabin does offer a taste of embodied American solitude — the chance to escape the confusion of modern culture for a while.

In my grander moments, I want, like Henry David Thoreau, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” To be able to look at a juniper tree, an eagle, and a mouse, and to see it as its elemental self, without humanly ascribed qualities.

Mostly though, I want to lie flat and feel my mind un-muddling.

IV.

In the afternoons, brief but violent winds would whip up out of nowhere—fierce enough to send my chair tumbling across the deck if I didn’t lay it flat.

I would lounge on the verandah — moving around the cabin to whatever side was in the shade, dozing off with some of Henry’s more surreal epithets in my head in the heat of a Nevada afternoon.

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

As the days of silence mount, the desert’s emptiness seems like a mirror, reflecting my thoughts and actions back to me.

I felt what Thoreau called "a certain doubleness." A psychological shift where you are able to step outside your own immediate ego—to observe your own mind as if you were standing beside a stranger.

I'm not sure if I've ‘fronted out the essential facts of life” but I've certainly become rather better acquainted with the small dramas unfolding around my cabin.

I begin to recognise how the ground owls guard their dusty territories, the morning routine of the cottontails, and the tiny rustle of the mouse that lives in the cabin wall. Survival for them was a daily, sacred act; I was merely a temporary guest with time to learn their customs.

Thoreau devoted an entire chapter to to what he called his “Brute Neighbors.” The ants, mice, and birds sharing his patch of Concord woods, observing them not as pests or commodities, but as sovereign beings with lives as serious as his own.

VI.

On my final morning, the car started without issue, and I thanked the desert spirits that the kangaroo rats had spared the wiring.

Driving away felt like breaking a spell. When I pulled over to move a boulder off the rutted track, an eagle swept down out of nowhere, skimming so low past my head that I could feel the rush of air from its wings. I felt undone.

With my head clear after weeks away from news, social media, and people, there was no self-conscious screen left between me and the world—just the raw, physical encounter. It was the desert's parting gift.

I turned off the dirt road and back onto the highway, suddenly aching for a fresh packet of Lay’s chips, basking in the afterglow of two extraordinary weeks at the cabin.

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