GETTING TO KNOW THOREAU

`The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass.

It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid

to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever

particle of that spirit is in me."

When's the last time you read the 14 volumes -- an estimated 2 million words -- of Henry David Thoreau's journal?

Cape Girardeau writer and nature-lover Mary Kullberg has saved many of us the effort.

She pored over the journals along with words from "Walden" and other sources for the purpose of collecting them into her book, "Wood-Notes Wild: Walking with Thoreau." The book, with drawings by Texas artist Christine Stetter, has just been published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Kullberg, who is married to retired Southeast Missouri State University biology professor Russ Kullberg, collected the works because she felt that most collections from his journals focus on nature and not the man who fathered the environmental movement.

Her book "portrays the Thoreau his closest friends knew -- brother to the trees, the sun and stars, the rocks, the ponds and rivers, the birds and animals -- an exuberant man who felt such a kinship with the earth that he could be no other place but with nature," Kullberg writes.

It's no secret that Thoreau was viewed as kooky and unindustrious by the people of Concord, Mass., who thought he did nothing all day but walk the fields and woods. "The people who understood Thoreau in Concord were other writers and young people," Kullberg says.

He did teach awhile, but refused to administer corporal punishment, so he started his own school that offered outdoor nature classes. But the death of his brother John so affected him that he left teaching and bought a cabin in the woods by a pond named Walden.

"We need the tonic of wildness," Thoreau has been famously quoted. "I have the feeling maybe he needed the tonic of nature, too, because of his brother's death," Kullberg says.

The journal was compiled over 24 years and was as central to Thoreau's existence as his daily walks through nature.

Kullberg has organized the book into four sections named for the four seasons. Each provides the reader with a sense of walking through the season with Thoreau himself. The walks seem short, when in fact they sometimes stretched 20 miles and far into the night.

The poetry of Thoreau's language impresses Kullberg and his scientific knowledge makes the same impression on her husband. "People looked at him and thought he was a ne'er-do-well but he was actually studying the habits of wildlife and trees," she says.

Kullberg did most of her own two years of research at Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University, which has an interlibrary loan program that can retrieve any book from any library in the country.

Kullberg now is at work on a book about Thoreau for young people. Her previous works are children's books and "Morning Mist: Thoreau and Basho Through the Seasons." The latter compares the words of Thoreau and the Japanese poet.

Thoreau had a special ability to be with animals, Kullberg says. "He would give a certain whistle and a woodchuck would come out of its burrow, another whistle and a crow would light on his shoulder,' she said.

"...He felt he was no greater than the animals.

Thoreau was only 44 when he died.

"Time is but the stream I go fishing in," he wrote early in his journal. "As I look into it, I see how shallow it is."