TWO WEEKS WITH WALDEN
Alone in Nevada’s High Desert
Led by:
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
For years, I dreamed of escaping to a cabin in the American wilderness. The strange thing was, I had never actually read the book on the subject: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. When I arrived at an off-grid cabin in Nevada, I found the book on the shelves waiting for me. With endless time on my hands and no distractions, I finally picked it up.
I.
After three days at the cabin, I walk to a hill that gets one bar of mobile signal. I pick up an email from Phil, my emergency contact in Wells:
“Nick, if you see this, leave the car bonnet raised, facing north — kangaroo rats can build a nest in your engine compartment in 24 hours, and they’re adept at chewing through wires.”
Having spent the last few days among the wild community of animals around the cabin in the Nevada desert, this warning makes me laugh, then wince. As I hightail it back to the cabin, I wonder if the gang of cute kangaroo rats watching me from under the shade of my hire car had, in fact, been plotting my downfall.
I am in Nevada as an artist in residence for two weeks at the Montello Foundation, which has built a cabin on a remote parcel of land in the Nevada desert. The residency is solo; this is my first time in an American desert, and clearly, I have a lot to learn.
To get to the cabin, I pick up a hire car from Salt Lake City Airport and drove under vast American skies to Montello, in Elko County, Nevada.
Montello has a post office, a general store, a filling station, and a cowboy bar. Outside the bar, a group of men chat over the back of a Chevrolet truck, watched by a strangely out-of-place poodle. Behind them, an American flag slumps in the window of a shuttered house.
A Statue of an Indian chief watches over me as I pick up a packet of Lay’s chips and a bag of coffee from between the display cases of hunting knives in the general store. The stone-faced man behind the counter remarks, “I don’t know how folks can afford to eat nowadays,” as he rings up $17 on the till.
I drive half a mile along the highway and turn off onto a dirt road. The cabin lies twenty miles away over the tufted hills. The drive takes a gruelling three hours along rutted tracks — getting out repeatedly to move rocks and avoid wrecking the car’s underside. By the time I arrive, I’m so wrung out that I drag a blanket onto the porch and fall asleep.
II.
I wake, and 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 have been promising myself to read one day: Emerson, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson.
Tucked among them is a well thumbed Signet Classics edition of Walden.
I’ve avoided reading Walden as I assumed it was too fusty for my modern tastes. But here I am 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 open the book. I expect the familiar caricature: a stern nineteenth-century preacher urging simplicity and self-denial.
Instead, I find 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, and I am in a world of starlight.
Coyotes call 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.
Its August, and the brutal reality of the desert quickly dictates my schedule: once the Nevada sun cleared the ridge, the heat becomes punishing, turning the basin into an open kiln. If I want to be outside at all, I have to get out early.
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 wrote that he loved mornings, arguing that most people are effectively only ‘awake’ during the very first hour of the morning. After that, they move through life half-awake, distracted by noise, gossip, ambition and endless busyness.
I’m not a morning person. I find myself walking, half asleep, through 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. The low clouds from the night’s storm scudding away and the air cold and sharp against my face.
When I return, a cottontail rabbit sits on the verandah as I cook a fry-up and drink my iced coffee in the morning. Then 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 sit and feel my mind un-muddling.
V.
In the afternoons, brief but violent winds whip up out of nowhere—fierce enough to send my chair tumbling across the deck if I don’t lay it flat.
I lounge on the verandah — moving around the cabin to whatever side was in the shade, dozing in the heat of a Nevada afternoon with one of Henry’s more surreal epithets in my head:
“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. At these moments I feel what Thoreau called "a certain doubleness” and I’m able to observe my own mind as if I’m standing beside a stranger.
I’m becoming more acquainted with the daily dramas unfolding around the cabin. I know the morning routines of the cottontails, and the habits of the mouse who lives in the cabin wall, and watch the ground owls guard their dusty territories.
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.
Survival for them is a daily, sacred act; I am merely a sojourner in their world.
VI.
On my final morning, the car starts without issue, and I thank the desert spirits that the kangaroo rats had spared the wiring.
Driving away feels like breaking a spell. When I pull over to move a boulder off the rutted track, an eagle sweeps down out of nowhere, skimming so low past my head that I can feel the rush of air from its wings.
I feel undone.
With my head clear after weeks away from news, social media, and people, there is no self-conscious screen left between me and the world—just the raw, physical encounter.
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.