Thoreau, The Kid and Mr. Lou

Lou Salome, a.k.a. Mr. Lou in Asia, Africa and Europe, lived for a year in the New Hampshire woods where he wrote Violence, Veils and Bloodlines -- Reporting from War Zones. He kept a daily journal detailing his life in the woods, a year when dreams, notebooks, a card game called cribbage, baseball and the natural world played vital roles, in helping to banish his demons. Those thick journals are the main, but not the only, source of this book. In the woods around his cabin at Lucas Pond, he met the ghosts of a like-minded Henry David Thoreau, baseball great Ted Williams and heavyweight boxing champ Jack Sharkey. He also matched the people of the woods with those of different tribes he met in Afghanistan, Iran, Bosnia, Russia, Ukraine and other areas far from New Hampshire. Thoreau had three chairs in his self-made one-room cabin in the woods at Walden Pond. He said so, in his own hand. One chair was for solitude, another for friendship and a third was for society . . . . At Big Buck Road, the seating arrangement was more for individual, me, rather than group therapy. Six chairs and a daybed, far superior to Henry David Thoreau's bed of nails, adorned the inner sanctum of my much larger cabin at Lucas Pond in Northwood, New Hampshire.