19 May 2005 ME, ALL ALONE, AT THE END OF THE WORLD by M.T. Anderson, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes, Candlewick, September 2005, ISBN: 0-7636-1586-2

"Up among the firs where it smells so sweet

Or down in valley where the river used to be

I got my mind on eternity

Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me"

--Bruce Cockburn, "Wondering Where the Lions Are"

It cost me five bucks to take an early train from North Station to Concord. Then I walked the last mile or so along the road, dodging traffic, stepping through, over, and around the plowed mounds of snow to reach the edge of the woods.

I chosen the perfect day to visit. During my morning's sojourn to the pond, I had the entire place to myself. As I walked through deep, untouched snow, I came across a single set of cross-country ski tracks and a few sets of fresh deer prints.

It was hard to believe that all the traffic on the nearest roads couldn't be heard as I gazed across the icy pond. But a light, whispering wind was all that was audible.

When Henry David Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond, the world's population was slightly in excess of one billion. Less than two hundred years later, that population has increased six-fold. (It has more than doubled just since I was a first grader learning to read in 1962.)

Now that there are so many fewer quiet spots left to go be contemplative and in tune with nature, the importance of these places is recognized by more and more enlightened people, many of whom have worked very hard over the past century to insure the protection by governmental entities and not-for-profit organizations of these natural little "quiet zones" .

And, of course, then there are the other people. I imagine they must have grown up learning that rude saying about how "Everything over a handful is wasted." and decided that such sentiments applied equally well to undeveloped lands.

"Hey, you've got a nearby regional park with a couple of hundred acres to wander around," they'd undoubtedly advise me. "You're never going to set foot anywhere within a thousand miles of those useless millions of acres way the hell and gone up in Alaska. There's no reason we shouldn't pump a little crude out from under there."

In 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, Walden Pond became the site of a brand new "excursion park" whose amenities eventually included concessions, swings, bath houses, a running track, baseball diamond, and dining hall. Fortunately, a fire in 1902 cleared it all away.

But what if they'd erected all that amusement park stuff while Henry was still hanging out there?

In ME, ALL ALONE, AT THE END OF THE WORLD, M.T. Anderson and Kevin Hawkes once again combine their amazing talents for genius to present an analogous scenario.

"How I love this peaceful place,

This healing place,

This place with wings."

--Joanne Rand, "I Love It"

The first glimpse we get of the boy who narrates the story, is of a barefoot youngster in denim overalls sitting on the left cheek of a grinning, pine-topped cliff.

"I lived by myself at the End of the World.

"The days were slow and fine. I looked for treasure with old maps from fallen empires. I dusted off rocks and found fossils. I put the bones of long monsters back together with twine. I played ball by the drop. I sat and read. I liked to listen to the wind from the empty spaces blow through the bristly pines. The branches swayed in the blue."

The boy lives his dreamy, idyllic life in peace, until a strange man shows up, scorns the boy's "boring" existence, and begins construction on "CONSTANTINE SHIMMER'S GALVANO-MAGIC END OF THE WORLD TOURS. FUN ALL THE TIME."

At first the young man is seduced by the excitement of the over-the-top development of the area and the swarms of tourists. But in time he comes to recognize that the glaring and blaring of the lights, the noise, the construction, and the destruction, have thoroughly eliminated all of the dreams and wonders of his former natural world. So he finally departs to go "live all alone at the Top of the World."

And it is bittersweet to hear him tell at the end of the story how he feels "the soft loneliness of the world falling in shadow," as he sits upon a barren cliff that so seems to lack much of the magic and joy of his original home.

Accompanied by Kevin Hawkes' magnificent watercolor and acrylic illustrations, this is both a profound and delightful story in itself, as well as the logical stepping off point for a dozen different philosophical journeys into other books and discussions, the direction dependent upon the different ages of the readers.

Now take a break, and go listen to the wind.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com