1. Following the Transcendental Trail: from Lake Padden to the Bellingham Bay

2. “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and excessive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into what the beholder measures the depth of his own nature” (Thoreau, 168).

3. “We become so distracted by our own agendas that, even when face to face with the grandeur of nature, we can only exclaim with Wordsworth, ‘Great God! It moves us not’ ” (Elder, 16).

4. “God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages” (Thoreau, 87).

5. ► ► “…wilderness possesses great spiritual value. It offers a realm for human activity that does not seek to take possession and that leaves no traces; it provides a baseline for strenuous experience of our own creaturehood” (Elder, 18).

6. “We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us” (Thoreau, 83).

7. ► “In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we are beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost…do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature” (Thoreau, 154).

8. ► “The idea of wilderness refers to the absence of humanity, yet wilderness has no meaning outside of the context of civilization that defines it” (Byerly, 27).

9. “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense.” (Frost lines 1 – 3).

10. “Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only…would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died…” (Thoreau, 236).

11. ► “The old roads and bottles and piles of stone scattered beneath the pines and hemlocks of our ridge always reminded me that I am not Adam after all, just as the sounds of chainsaws and traffic I could hear from Route 116 almost the whole way up insisted that this hike would not take place in Eden. These are healthy reminders, encouraging me to understand wilderness as an experience including family and work, rather than as an idyll or escape” (Elder, 112).

12. ► “I understood, too, that ‘a sense of place’ would remain a vague concept if founded only in my researches into the natural and human history of Bristol, and in my readings of Frost and Wordsworth. The galvanizing stories of place are finally those we suffer for ourselves” (Elder, 42).

13. ► “Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard” (Frost, lines 33 – 39).

14. ► “Human existence, personal relationships, and settlements are always encompassed by particular intervals of time and space” (Elder, 137).

15. ► “The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all the muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell” (Thoreau, 296).

16. Credits Tour Guide and Photos: Nathan Sun-Kleinberger Text by some of my favorite Transcendental Authors: ► Allison Byerly from “The Uses of Landscape.” ► John Elder from Reading the Mountains of Home. ► Robert Frost from “Mending Wall.” ► Henry David Thoreau from Walden.