I came of age during a period as turbulent and confusing as the present, marked by the Vietnam War and then the civil rights, environmental and women’s movements; “gay rights” soon followed.

For many, mostly but not exclusively on the left, those movements established a national consensus behind equality under the law and care for the Earth, with the federal government playing a leading role through ambitious legislation in Congress and a supportive role from the courts.

Things have played out differently. Republicans united around the obverse of this imagined consensus, while the Democratic Party – which remains at least on paper committed to these ideals – is undergoing an identity crisis whose outcome cannot be predicted.

At such times, one must look elsewhere for compass points and guides to where we, as individuals and in community, may want to go.

I was privileged to again spend time recently in Concord, Massachusetts, the fount not only of the American Revolution but also of compelling 19th Century literature and philosophy.

It’s still astonishing that in one small village the multifarious talents of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne bore fruit and multiplied.

And it is in one particular spot – the Old North Bridge over the Concord River – that these currents converge.

On a frosty late fall morning, no one else is around. On the banks, flanking the replica bridge witnessing “the shot heard round the world” on April 19, 1775 – still Patriots Day in Massachusetts and Maine – are the Minuteman Statue and the earlier 1836 Battle Monument, an obelisk whose dedication featured the first reading of Emerson’s immortal poem, “By the Rude Bridge.”

But my attention was focused up the slope to the Old Manse, then owned by Emerson’s grandfather, William Emerson, the town minister whose fiery sermons sparked what would become the flame of liberty, more than a year before Independence was proclaimed in Philadelphia.

The Old Manse, as Hawthorne dubbed it in his first book, was the scene of the happiest years of this gloomiest among great American writers following his marriage to Sophia Peabody, even as he wrote about America’s dark colonial past many contemporaries preferred to ignore, and some still do.

The boathouse below the Manse was the scene of a historic and comical encounter where Hawthorne, scion of New England aristocracy, first met Thoreau, the free spirit who marched to no one’s drummer save his own.

Thoreau was an expert boatsman and woodsman, but an indifferent teacher. According to Hawthorne’s journal account, he did reasonably well at rowing, but not canoeing.

Thoreau had told him the canoe would move “where you guide it” – not helpful advice, since the contrary motion produced by even a single stroke needs to be feathered and corrected if one is ever to pursue a straight course.

The great explorer of nature was indeed a vexation to some of his neighbors, even Emerson, who gave permission to build the simple cabin at nearby Walden Pond that inspired Thoreau’s most famous book and has since become a shrine for followers and devotees.

I have a soft spot, by contrast, for the grandeur of Thoreau’s accounts of the Maine Woods, the Penobscot wilderness and Katahdin, forays to Chesuncook and Moosehead, put together after his death from his journals.

Thoreau was often my companion on solo hikes into the Green and White mountains and, of course, on Katahdin itself. If any one figure can be said to have created the modern conception of “wilderness,” it is Thoreau.

Yet in the end his own judgment was that “I have traveled much in Concord,” where he was born and died. It was here that he learned to “live deliberately,” against the welter of what was then an early industrial society pursuing other aims.

Thoreau titles the first chapter of Walden “Economy” and he was serious about the need to balance a thoughtful approach to life with the latest thing, in his day the railroad and in ours the digital realm.

“Simplify, simplify” was his admonition, more prescient that ever amid the fervor for AI and “monetization.”

Thoreau’s devotion to the road less traveled did not entail a solitary existence; there were always guides and compatriots, and he was a regular for Sunday dinners at the Emersons.

Thoreau was no idler. He thought for himself alone and inspired two of the 20th century’s greatest revolutionaries of non-violent resistance, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

As Rev. Emerson fueled the quest for liberty, Thoreau called us to become stewards of the Earth, though each new generation must find its own way.

We too can travel much in Concord.

Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He is the author of four books, most recently a biography of U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net.