We have 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. Realising 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 has not 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 is 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 are 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.