Tuckaseegee author Thomas Rain Crowe is just back from reading from his recently published book, Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, at Thoreau’s Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., as part of a 10-day reading and lecture tour of New England.

The last stop at Walden Pond was the grand finale and the culminating event in not only the New England trip but in five months of constant touring promoting his book.

“The Walden Pond reading was the icing on the cake,” says Crowe from his Tuckaseegee home in the Canada community of Jackson County. “Since Thoreau is so much a part of this book, and since he has been such an inspiration to me over the years, it’s more than appropriate that my promotional work for Zoro’s Field would end at Walden Pond.”

Crowe said he immediately said yes when he got the call from the Thoreau Society asking him to do the reading at Walden Pond.

“Then I began work putting together a larger tour around this event so that I could afford to go,” said Crowe. “I guess the adage of ‘what goes around, comes around’ proves to be true in this case, as my consciousness as an environmentally conscious person began with Thoreau and Emerson, early on, and now my work with Zoro’s Field has ended up in their back yard.”

Crowe’s Zoro’s Field is an account of four years in which he lived off the grid and self-sufficiently along the Green River in Polk County from 1978 to 1982. Zoro’s Field is a chronicle of that time when, for four years, he survived by his own hand without electricity, plumbing, modern-day transportation, or regular income. A book that is paced to nature’s rhythms and cycles, it is filled with a sensibility one gains only through the pursuit of a consciously simple, spiritual, environmentally responsible life. In his book Crowe writes of many things: digging a root cellar, being a good listener, gathering wood, living in the moment, tending a mountain garden, keeping bees, making homebrew. He also explores profound questions on wilderness, self-sufficiency, urban growth, and ecological overload.

Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture wrote about Zoro’s Field “This book will appeal to anyone who has imagined unhinging from the cumbersome structures of ‘progress’ and consumerism in order to know the rhythms of quiet work and nature.”

Crowe, who spent his boyhood in Robbinsville in Graham County, has lived in Jackson County for the past 20 years. Living in the farming community of Tuckaseegee where he continues to live a rurally simple lifestyle, he says of his life: “Three things that I’ve brought to Jackson County with me from those years in the Polk County woods is — I continue to grow a large garden which is the major part of my food supply; I continue to heat exclusively with wood; and I still don’t wear a watch.”

Along with his farming tendencies, Crowe also stays busy by writing columns and features for the Smoky Mountain News (the essays that became Zoro’s Field were serialized in their initial drafts in monthly installments in The Smoky Mountain News) while being involved with the Canary Coalition (which is concerned with the issue of air quality in the Smokies and the western North Carolina mountains) as well as being on the board for the Environmental Leadership Council based at Warren Wilson College in Swananoa.

Copies of Zoro’s Field are available at Osondu Books in Waynesville, City Lights Books in downtown Sylva, Highlands Books in Brevard, and at Malaprops and Barnes & Noble bookstores in Asheville, and online at amazon.com. A new collection of the poems from Zoro’s Field has just been published by Holocene Press in South Carolina. On Nov. 19 Crowe will be at the Smoky Mountain Book Fair in Sylva. Details and further information for these events can be found on Crowe’s website at www.newnativepress.com.