Thoreau was less a tame nature writer and more of a wild nature writer. He was an early advocate for immersion in nature, especially in what he called “wildness” by which he did not just mean the wilderness without, but also the wildness within, “the bog in our brains and our bowels,” as he put it in his journal. Wildness is the grotesque lower strata of the body and the grotesque lower strata of the earth, especially swamps. The grotesque lower strata of the body, the mind, and the earth are where monsters, such as alligators, live. The monstrous lives in the grotesque lower strata. The grotesque and the monstrous in nature and nature writing express the carnivalesque that subverts hierarchies and their institutions, as Thoreau did. He was especially a prankster of the carnivalesque who subverted the hierarchies of tame over wild, brain over bowels, city over swamp. The carnivalesque manifests the grotesque body, mind, and places as a whole. He was as much a subversive political writer and civil disobeyer whose thoughts are “murder to the state,” and to corporations, as he was a wild nature writer of woods, ponds, swamps, and their creatures.