The British writer Bruce Chatwin, probably best known for his travel books, "In Patagonia" and "The Songlines," once remarked about travel writing and its authors, "I'm not interested in the traveler. I'm interested in what the traveler sees."

I'm not aware that Chatwin ever read Thoreau, but if he didn't, it's a pity because Thoreau is the attentive traveler par excellence. He tells you, as accurately and precisely as he can, not only what he sees but also what he hears, smells, touches, and tastes. Read his accounts of his journeys to Katahdin, Chesuncook, the Allagash and the East Branch in "The Maine Woods," and you'll have the next best thing to going there yourself.

His use of Latin names for flora and fauna makes for a clarity that vernacular names with their muddle of local variants can't provide. Then, too, in his quest for accuracy, Thoreau can go to touching and whimsical lengths.

Lacking a tape measure or ruler to measure the moose his guide, Joe Aitteon, had shot, Thoreau commandeered the painter from the canoe, stretched it from the tip of the animal's nose to its tail and from the tip of a front hoof to its shoulder and tied knots at the respective intervals. But because Joe needed to reclaim the painter, Thoreau recorded the lengths of knotted rope in lengths and fractions of his umbrella, which he was finally able to translate into feet and inches with the aid of a ruler he borrowed in Chesuncook village the next day.

"All these pains I took," he writes with his usual wry wit, "because I did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large."

Like the good naturalist and scientist he is, Thoreau has the insatiable curiosity of a happy kid larking about in the woods. There's nothing he doesn't care to know, nothing he won't try. He wants to know the Penobscot word for every river, lake, mountain, plant, creature.

Following Joe Aitteon's example, he samples the fruit of hobblebush and witherod ("insipid and seedy"); he cooks the bulbs of the Canada lily up in a soup ("palatable enough, but it reminded me of the Irishman's limestone broth"). And if you want to know what a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it sounds like, Thoreau knows because he was there to hear it: "Once...we heard, come faintly echoing, or creeping from far, through the moss-clad aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness."

In a passage like that, you get, of course, not just what the traveler sees (or hears) but the mind and heart of the traveler himself as well. That Thoreau was drawn to the "damp and shaggy wilderness" of the Maine woods is not surprising, for he tells us in his famous essay "Walking" that, "When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and to the citizen, the most dismal swamp."

In such seemingly inhospitable places, Thoreau goes "in search of the springs of life."

What for just about anyone else would have been a low point on his Allagash and East Branch trip was a high point for Thoreau. When he missed the right trail on the mile and a half carry from Umbazooksus Lake to Mud Pond and wallowed instead through five miles of swamps to Chamberlain Lake, he nonetheless continued to botanize, delighting in the swamp birch and the great round-leaf orchis he spotted along the way and remarking cheerfully, when this sloppy, exhausting trek was over, "I would not have missed that walk for a great deal."

When Thoreau wrote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," then, he probably wasn't thinking just about the wildness of the west that was opening up in his lifetime but also about the mountaintops and swamps of Maine. We think of Thoreau as a philosopher of the wild, but he was also and perhaps more importantly a philosopher concerned for the preservation of the world.

"From the forest and the wilderness," he writes, "come the tonics and barks which brace mankind." Without wilderness, in other words, civilization pales and withers and dies. It is to that thought of his we would do well to attend.

Robert Kimber lives in Temple, Maine and is a writer and translator whose work includes "A Canoeist's Sketchbook." He can be reached at rrkimber@megalink.net.