“Maine’s Golden Road,” by John Gould, W.W. Norton, 191 pages, $21.

At 80-something, John Gould has been traveling his own Golden Road for a few years now.

Perhaps the century’s pre-eminent chronicler of Maine lore, Gould has nearly 30 books to his name. A pretty fair legacy, even he would admit.

And now, after a lifetime of stepping on probably every blade of grass from Portland to Presque Isle, Gould has taken to the road to follow one of his more notable predecessors.

For 30-odd summers, Gould and Bill Dornbusch, his son’s father-in-law, have made annual Grandfathers’ Retreats deep into the Maine woods, somewhat shadowing the literary path Henry David Thoreau cut 150 years previously. They walked where Thoreau walked, camped where Thoreau camped.

“You can say,” Gould writes early on in “Maine’s Golden Road,” “we picked Thoreau’s rear.”

As always, Gould writes with a certain insight that humorists of later generations don’t nearly match. “Golden Road” will not make you wake the spoouse with laughter, but is more of the now-that-you-mention-it variety.

Describing the start of Thoreau’s journey to Maine, for example, Gould writes, “Mr. Thoreau was then 29 years of age and although a graduate of Harvard College was considered fairly bright.”

As did Thoreau, Gould essentially begins in Bangor, describing the view of the bustling Queen City that the young Massachusetts scribe could not possibly have ignored. But he even takes the reader to places Thoreau either didn’t visit, or didn’t bother to mention visiting.

Take, for example, Devil’s Half Acre, a sort of romping ground near Exchange Street for the city’s rough-and-tumble lumbering community.

With Fanny Jones and her ladies-for-rent ready for offering and the Penobscot Exchange Hotel so close, Devil’s Half Acre was the place to be for the adventurous. Not to mention that the hotel prepared a breakfast menu longer than a white pine is tall for all of 35 cents.

Thoreau never wrote about Exchange Street when he described Bangor in “The Maine Woods,” but Gould doesn’t echo his mistake.

“Forever uncelebrated by Henry David Thoreau, the Devil’s Half Acre and the Penobscot Exchange Hotel went their way in an urban renewal project of our more enlightened age,” Gould writes, turning to his gentle Yankee sarcasm.

For most writers, digressing into other subjects can cause fits in editors. But when John Gould takes off in another direction, as he does often in “The Golden Road,” it’s like discovering a sleeping fawn after taking the wrong trail.

Lesser writers could not, in a matter of a few lines, jump from describing Thoreau measuring a moose in umbrella sections to one of L.L. Bean’s first marketing goofs.

Bean, Gould notes, eventually offered a foul-weather cape that was sold in an oilskin pouch about the size of a man’s wallet. Problem was, there was no way to return the cape to the pouch after it became wet.

“Mr. Bean’s unqualified money-back pledge cost him dearly, and the item was not in the next catalog,” Gould writes. “His buyers did, however, find other weather gear, but there is something to be said for an umbrella if you expect to measure a moose.”

“Golden Road” rambles like this at times, covering more territory than the North Woods themselves. Whether it’s pre-outlet Freeport to his boyhood skunk-skinning talents to Bill’s first salmon, reading Gould is like listening to your grandfather.

Thoreau is here throughout though, and often peeks out like the bald eagles over Cauc Lake that entertained Gould and Dornbusch for many a summer.

Though somewhat skimpy, as Gould’s books tend to be, “Golden Road” is more than retracing Thoreau’s steps or lamenting the changes in the North Woods.

These stories, too, are Gould’s history, both distant and recent. Pay heed, because like the North Woods, this view of Maine won’t last forever.