“After breakfast, I emptied the melted pork that was left into the lake, making what sailors call a slick …”

– Henry David Thoreau, “The Maine Woods”

There was a news story last week about the four finalists in the design Competition for the Maine commemorative quarter to be minted in 2003. One design, a depiction of the state’s most famous mountain, elicited a sharp response from an alert reader who held the opinion that Maine would be boneheaded indeed if it offered the nation a coin that misspelled Katahdin. This elicited even sharper responses from many other readers. ” The poor misinformed soul obviously has not read her Thoreau,” they sniffed. “He spelled it Ktaadn; therefore, that spelling must be correct.”

I have just done two things I promised myself I would never do. 1) Begin a column with a quote from Thoreau and 2) use “sniffed” to describe a criticism delivered in a supercilious tone. I am very disappointed in me.

About sniffed. If you read commentary on arts and culture in any of the many sophisticated publications available today, you no doubt have seen this word used so often lately it is fair to wonder if the entire population of aesthetes is not afflicted with severe post-nasal drip. It seems a good many writers toiling in this field do not consider their day’s work done until they find some know-it-all willing to sniff somebody else’s oeuvre.

As in: “I find the painter Blott altogether too derivative, in a quasi-neo-Byzantinesque manner,” sniffed the noted critic Whitless. “Plus, he doesn’t draw nearly enough naked people.”

Anyway, I looked over the four coin finalists and tried sniffing, but no such luck. I got the sharp intake of air through the nostrils the word suggests just fine, but the production of a derisive and snide comment eluded me. The best I could do was a couple of knock-knock jokes and a pretty fair limerick. Guess it takes practice.

About Thoreau. Ask anyone who edits opinion pages for a living – or, I’ll bet, who grades student essays – and they’ll tell you that the opening quote from Thoreau is a jejune conceit out of which many writers never grow. I mentioned this all-too common practice, and the accompanying assertion that if Thoreau said it, it must be true, to a co-worker who used to do the job I now do but for a couple of decades longer. No sooner had the name in question passed my lips when he launched into an extended rant about the man he considers, from the editor’s point of view, to be one of the leading public nuisances of the last several centuries. If there was profit in dragging deceased deep thinkers from their graves and slapping some sense into them, he, by golly, knew right where he’d start.

Anyway, this most recent Thoreau-knows-best exchange prompted me the other night to fetch out my moldering copy of his collected works and to re-read that section of “The Maine Woods” – his account his travels here 150 years ago – titled “The Allegash and the East Branch” That’s right. He misspells Allagash. And Old Town. And about 36 other Maine places. So, by all means, let’s put his version of Katahdin of our quarter, shall we?

This section opens with our hero scrounging around what he calls Oldtown for a guide for this trip up north. He latches onto a highly recommended Penobscot named Joe Pilos and promptly wheedles Pilos’ going rate of $2 a day down to $1.50. As the groaning Pilos lugs the canoe, all the provisions and dry socks for the entire party down to the water, Thoreau, who lugs nothing but his own deep thoughts, whines that Pilos isn’t much of a conversationalist.

Ever notice how, when Pilos is doing the real work of surviving in the wilderness, such as skinning a freshly killed moose or setting up camp, Thoreau always picks that very moment to go on a nature walk? The Penobscot’s to his armpits in entrails and Nature Boy’s off cataloging daisies.

I especially enjoyed he several passages in which Thoreau complains bitterly about being “molested” by the many active insects found in the Maine Woods. You go, black flies.

Thoreau’s depiction of Pilos is puzzling for such an enlightened Transcendentalist. Let Pilos perform extraordinary feats of strength and cunning, and Thoreau dismisses them as what was expected. Let Pilos slip on a moss covered rock while lugging a canoe, provisions, socks and half a dead moose, and Thoreau enjoys a big old belly laugh. In that pork dumping incident, Pilos observes that such things just aren’t done – it fouls the water and mucks up the canoe. Thoreau does not give the observation his full attention – he’s too busy admiring the pretty rainbows the sludge makes on the formerly pristine lake. Imagine the fun he’d have had with a 55-gallon drum of waste oil.

According to Thoreau, every backwoods hick they meet on this trip speaks perfect English. In Pilos, to whom English was a second language, Thoreau finds great amusement. Here’s a likely Pilosism Thoreau omitted: “Letum meum get this straightum. Meum do all the workum while you sit around all day on your bigum fatum…”

Still, Thoreau was a man of firsts. Many say he was the first environmentalist (the pork incident could, after all, have been an early experiment in hydrology). The first to preach civil disobedience as a way to right society’s wrongs (although it helps to have a doting auntie bail you out after one night in jail). The first to discover that you could work but six weeks a year and loaf the rest if you squatted on somebody else’s land and pilfered every piece of building material your Concord neighbors hadn’t nailed down (a vacation schedule no doubt enjoyed by workers at the Thoreau pencil factory).

And, apparently, the first to come to Maine from a certain nearby state, to shortchange the locals and make fun of them, to trash the countryside and then to go home and fret that Maine might not always stay the way they found it. Yep, Thoreau may well have been the first – all true Mainers know the word. It starts with “Mass” and ends with something that does not rhyme with “cherished and welcomed guest.”

The other side of the Thoreau coin is that for every letter we get citing Thoreau as the ultimate authority on the way Maine should be, we get at least six responses from Mainers snorting (the rustic version of sniffing) that such people ought to go back to that certain nearby state and build a dad-blamed national park there. Nothing wrong with that view – goodness knows, we publish enough of them – just don’t think you thought of it first. Joe Pilos beatum you to it.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.