We've all read books that changed our lives but one college professor gets more than he bargains for when he picks up a dusty, dog-eared copy of the American classic Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Proud postmodern consumer and card-carrying member of the I Hate Nature Club, Michael Gurnow is content in his role as American literature professor at a Midwest college.   Everything changes once he gets done reading Thoreau's masterpiece.  Realizing he has been living a life of quiet desperation, it suddenly occurs to him that even though it's his job to teach tales of other people's adventures, he hasn't lived any of his own.

Without a second thought, Gurnow hands in his resignation before driving to the nearest state park and applies to be the wilderness equivalent of a construction worker.  "How hard can trail maintenance be?" he asks himself.  "It's a minimum-wage job."

He quickly learns there is a difference between book smarts and common sense.  In this mile-a-minute comedy of errors, Gurnow discovers why it's a bad idea to get into a fistfight with a mudslide, horny hornets are a force to be reckoned with, being able to identify poison ivy is a grossly undervalued skill, and you can't outrun deer--even if you're naked.

With a tie-dye cast of characters, Gurnow compresses several hard-won years in the wilderness into four side-splitting seasons.  With his newly minted critical eye toward consumer culture, he reveals the surprisingly complex world of trail maintenance while taking the reader on a guided, philosophic tour of the nature classics.

Introduction by The Aldo Leopold Foundation; Afterword by Lawton Grinter, author of I Hike.