Thoreau was the King of the Backyard Campers; he walked a mile or two to the local lakeshore and recorded his observations there, when he wasn’t walking into town to get a little R&R from the “wilderness.”
As such, he’s been the model for and best friend of anti-social Nature dilettantes for more than a hundred years.
One is left to wonder, however, whether he might not have had the same piercing insights sitting on the back porch.
I’ve heard that when Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson rang the dinner bell, Thoreau was the first one at the table.