Walden Pond is America's environmental holy land, the naturalist's sacred site and Concord's local swimming pool. The iconic image of living in solitude amid nature's wildness, immortalized in Henry David Thoreau's Walden, has made the pond's power as place endure. Long after the transcendentalists of Thoreau's generation worshiped its deep waters, latter-day pilgrims seek out its shores as poets and philosophers once did. So, alas, do the crowds, who, towel to towel, jam the narrow beach, splash in the cool waters and blare boomboxes as the twenty-first century rolls along.

As much artifact and feel-good brand name as national treasure, Walden Pond, with its precious shores and wooded surrounds, creates a burden for our times: How shall we preserve the waters and wildness? How conserve the cairn of rocks piled by passing worshipers who throw a stone on this hillock at the far end of the pond as a marker--and more: How shall we make the memories of Thoreau's Walden, set in the historic town of Concord, into a map of the mindset of this scribe and his New England literary peers and heirs? How relay Thoreau's genius as science or natural history writer and guiding light to such spiritual seekers and holy men as Gandhi?

Still more problematical: How do we maintain the Pond's ongoing life, the ecology of the larger Walden Woods and the use and beauty of the town of Concord, whose village values defined Thoreau's core as much as the woods honored by his classic volume? Scribe and saunterer in equal measure--a precise four hours a day devoted to each, one biographer has written--Thoreau is a whole man hard to blend with this holistic environment. Blessed, or cursed, with this intellectual-cum-physical legacy, W. Barksdale Maynard has taken on no small task as biographer (or is it topo-biographer?) in Walden Pond: A History.

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